2024-12-06

Meeting of IT Appointees in November 2024

The topics on the agenda of the 28th ITB Assembly met with great interest. Over 300 people attended to find out about innovations to the SCC's range of services.

online meeting

The SCC welcomed over 300 people from around 120 organizational units. 

The information on the urgent need for action in the context of the certification service (KIT-CA) was particularly important. The IT officers received information about necessary measures after it recently became known that the CA service provider Sectigo had surprisingly terminated its contract with GÉANT early. This means that the issuing of certificates at KIT will no longer be secured from 01.10.25 and certificates that expire in 2025 should in any case be renewed by the end of the year 2024.

Mr. Axel Maurer explained the technical basis of the KIT-Card and highlighted the security aspects of the KIT-Card. The KIT-Card meets the highest security requirements (Commen Criteria certification of EAL5+) if it is used by applications with DESFire. Interested parties are welcome to contact the KIT-Card Service Team if they have any questions regarding the use of the KIT-Card for specific applications.

The portfolio of services offered by the SCC is constantly being expanded. We also took a look at new and future IT services at the SCC.

With a view to the M365 roadmap, the SCC provided information about the introduction of Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint online. OneDrive will be offered as an additional data service at KIT in the future. The pilot phase in which various organizational units at KIT are participating is currently underway. OneDrive and Teams are based on SharePoint online, which means that SharePoint online can soon be used by several teams to manage documents. The SCC is calling on interested IT officers to participate in the development of these services.

The digitalization of administrative processes is already supported by the new KIT approval portal, which is described in detail in our SCC News 01|2024. A few processes have already been implemented there.

From 02/2025, the SCC can offer the organizational units at KIT data center space on the South Campus for the operation of server systems. The infrastructure and characteristics of the future “server housing” service were presented.

And AI is not stopping at the SCC's portfolio of services either. A new service will support transcription with OpenAI Whisper on local hardware and enable translation by the EU eTranslation service, while the two state projects bwCloud3 and bwJupyter are concerned with the addition of corresponding AI components (LLMs, Runner Harbor, K8s), among other things. 

Further information and topics can be found in the presentation for the ITB meeting.

Birgit Junker